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The Inter-Parliamentary Union has requested the OpeningParliament.org community’s assistance. Following the first two publications in the IPU’s parliamentary self-assessment toolkit, the IPU is now developing a project called Indicators for Democratic Parliaments (writeup available in...

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#Post2015 Development Agenda reports; Principles and the Global Partnership

At the NGLS Consultation page the United Nations Non-Governmental Liaison Service (UN-NGLS) is facilitating a consultation to gather critical analysis from civil society on four post-2015 reports submitted to the UN Secretary-General:

1)     High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda (Post-2015 HLP) 2)     UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) 3)     UN Global Compact (UNGC) - Release expected in mid-June 4)     UN Development Group (UNDG) - Release expected in August

The reports that are already available cover important topics, yet when analysing the TO-BE partnership from an enterprise architecture perspective, it strikes me immediately that one has quickly passed over the 27 Rio Principles that were agreed in 1992.

The report by the SDSN network (2) does not directly refer the Rio Principles.

As for the High-Level Panel Report (1), I noticed this: a) review of Rio Principles is in the Terms of Reference; b) the report ''praises'' the Rio Principles and favours their continued use; c) the report is quite explicit on the negative impacts of land grabs, yet  when trying to find a Rio Principle that would ''condemn'' land grabs, none seems particularly suited; d) the report proposes an ''extended'' global partnership, yet the Rio Principles are rather biased towards state-to-state partnerships, and states' roles Hence my observation that the High-level Panel missed an opportunity to propose new or modified principles, that would offer guidance to all branches in the new global partnership. In my further critical analysis of the reports submitted to the Secretary General, I will use the lens of Enterprise Architecture, as prescribed by TOGAF to create a draft Global Partnership Architecture as a case in Societal Architecture: The Handbook (Work in progress, Leanpub).

Further reading:

Enterprise Architecture, the Preliminary Phase according to TOGAF.

The Global Partnership, description in the Actor Atlas.

A multi-level monitoring & evaluation standard for health systems - exploring the option (2010, at Scribd)

Societal Architecture: The Handbook (Work in progress, Leanpub)

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#India's #12thplan and the Social Media Dream

A draft of the Twelfth Five Year Plan 2012-17 by the Planning Commission of the Government of India has been published at the Planning Commission's website.

On 6 & 7 April 2013 the Planning Commission and the National Innovation Council are inviting citizens to innovatively communicate the Plan through creative visualizations and software applications. This is at the first ever Hackathon on aFive Year Plan (2012-17). 

These are exciting times, and social media will play an increasing role in implementing Five Year Plans.

More than half a century ago, Dwight D. Eisenhower said: "Plans are nothing; planning is everything." How to interpret this quote in the contemporary public planning and media setting?

The current version of the plan is published as three pdf books, of 360, 436 and 292 pages. A very good read for any one interested in the socio-economic status of India, its states, its economic sectors and its people.

The success of the plan will depend on how it facilitates further planning, and on the communication of insights and resulting commitments to stakeholders, including those at the base of the pyramid. It is clear that the current version of the plan is nothing in that regard, and that expectations are high that creative visualizations and software applications will improve the situation.

The India development dashboard is intended to offer a service in the targetted low-hurdle communication of planning inputs and outputs among all stakeholders in all economic sectors and functions of government. The Social Media Dream being that the people of India can harvest the everything of public planning.

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Using #ISIC hashtags on #twitter for bundling niche content

May be you have some very interesting article about the raising of sheep, or the growing of maize, or of any other sector listed at http://www.actor-atlas.info/sector-actors-maps  

ISIC denotes about five hundred classes of economic activities with a four digit code.

For each of these codes there is an individual Actor Atlas page, for instance:

http://www.actor-atlas.info/csm:0144  for ISIC 0144 - Raising of sheep and goats .

If you have a Twitter account, and know or wrote an article that is particularly relevant to any ISIC class of economic activities, then find the ISIC code, e.g. 0144 , and use #isic0144 in the tweet with the article's link (and title).

Visitors of the Actor Atlas, looking for information on their sector of interest will see your tweet and may access the article, even weeks after you tweeted it. No need for retweeting anymore!

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Why Nations Fail - Reviewed by Bill Gates

Bill Gates took issue with Why Nations Fail. See his review and the many comments the review and the book received.

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An Indiana farmer will face off on Tuesday against the world’s largest seed company in a case that could deal a huge blow to the future of genetically modified crops.

Content curator's comment: Further context information (links) for this case with a global relevance is at the 09 - Farmers' Rights article of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture where there is also a link to the journal article (comments).

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Curating #Pinterest pinboards now - #crowd #curating #infographics tomorrow?

Visual Loop maintains a large number of infographics pinboards.

A number of these are related to functions of government or economic activities. That's why resource links have been included in these Actor Atlas pages:

Economic activities (ISIC Sections)

I - Accommodation and food service activities

Q - Human health and social work activities

Economic activities (ISIC Classes)

0127 - Growing of beverage crops

0610 - Extraction of crude petroleum

1102 - Manufacture of wines

3510 - Electric power generation, transmission and distribution

3600 - Water collection, treatment and supply

5110 - Passenger air transport

5813 - Publishing of newspapers, journals and periodicals

7420 - Photographic activities

8620 - Medical and dental practice activities

8890 - Other social work activities without accommodation

Functions of government (COFOG classes)

01.1.2 - Financial and fiscal affairs (CS) 07.2.3 - Dental services (IS)

Role pages

Teacher

If you know of other pinboards or infographics that are specific to any of the functions of government, sectors of industry, or actors or roles, then let us now at the suitable Actor Atlas page, by commenting, and we will make sure the infographics get crowd curated.

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Nothing has more potential to let us reimagine higher education than massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms.

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Check the link for further details on the Aqueduct Water Risk Framework.

Comment: Another interesting case for content curation with the Actor Atlas. Answers to these questions will be included:

which roles are involved?

which functions of government?

which economic activities?

the indicators used should be listed in the Indicator Dictionary?

Will be continued. By whom?

Do you have the guts to give it a try?

Make the exercise in a blog article, and provide the link in a comment.

It will be acknowledged!

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Content curating on the "too big to fail" problem

Reading the tweets by  @theneweconomics my attention goes to

How much of a subsidy do #US#banks receive from being too big to fail? And four ways to change it http://ow.ly/gVfHO

A link to an article by The Financial Times to which I register free for online access to 8 articles/month. Nice.

The article mentions topics for which I perform actions in the Actor Atlas:

the Dodd-Frank Act: the link to a signed original is added at http://www.actor-atlas.info/statute-book:united-states ),

the General Accountability Office (this is a mistake in the FT, must be Government Accountability Office):  A US public sector agency (= actor in the Actor Atlas jargon), for which a role page is created: http://www.actor-atlas.info/role:government-accountability-office. In this page I generalize a definition for the U.S. situation towards a generic one, referring to Legislature, Executive, and Citizens.

open access academic literature: Have we solved 'too big to fail'? (in VoxEU.Org, by Andrew G Haldane, January 17, 2013) 

both articles, the one in the Financial Times, and the one by Haldane mention a number of options to deal with the too big to fail problem: these I haven't studied in detail yet, as these options are from trustworthy sources, I put links in a comment at the sector map http://www.actor-atlas.info/sector-map:financial-sector

Now I invite readers to join the Google+ community Stewardship of Finance and  further describe and analyse the proposed options. This could be done in a Debategraph, for instance following the ParliamentWatch Pattern.

To be continued in the Google+ community!

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Beyond SEO and As-Is Media: Optimizing Social Engagement for Inclusive Innovation

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, this is relying upon technology to make content findable according to pull-mode.

There are two mainstreams in the As-Is media.

Inclusive social media in which everyone has become a creator, pushing content to the socially engaged via ''spam'' of the first (e-mail), second (posting) or third (chain-posting) kind.

Traditional media, on the other hand, caters to the socially privileged. It maintains the rent-picking business models optimized in the printing-press age for engaging the economically privileged in non-inclusive innovations.

The search-engine-for-pull and social-media-for-push entrenches inclusive content interactions into a creation wave that hardly yields social engagement for inclusive innovation. Hence the (image of a) content tsunami hiding the Internet's inclusive innovative potential.

The small differences that would yield a critical juncture in our media use for inclusive innovation are simple. It consists of nourishing some of the best practices of the printing press age in the age of Internet.

Open online dictionaries, encyclopedias (Wikipedia) and translation services (Google Translate) are building blocks. The Actor Atlas aims to further improve the social engagement for inclusive innovation. This is explored in these Google+ Communities:

On Smart Content

Wikiworx User Group

Acknowledgements. These discussions have stimulated the writing of this article:

With Philippe Verstichel: https://plus.google.com/u/0/104272445949750214224/posts/fd4fzWFpNEv (in Smart Content)

With Hazel Chism: https://plus.google.com/u/0/115317319130028017980/posts/PcdBMBmodu6 (in Google+ Community ''Community Moderators'')

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The Actor Atlas in 2012 - a retrospective

The Actor Atlas aims to become a crowd-maintained MECE source on sustainable development and public-private partnerships content and best practices.

Currently it contains several thousands of pages with linked content covering most countries of the world, all functions of government and all sectors of industry. Too many to maintain with a 1-person crowd. Hence the crowd must grow!

While we have Google Search, Bing, other search engines and crawling robots continuously searching the Internet for new content, is there a need for an Actor Atlas?

Yes, there is. Consider that the utility of a dictionary or an enclopedia printed on paper derives from an orderly presentation and a Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive (MECE) character of its content. The alphabetic order is used when searching a word and the MECE promise guarantees success for (nearly) all searches. The usage of this alphabetic order is taught at primary school.

As few people create new words, most of us do not appreciate the utility of the alphabetic order when including a new word in the dictionary, or a new item in an encyclopedia.

The tips and tricks for online (re)search are in this infographic Get More Out of Google.

Yet what to do with the genuine new content resulting from your work?

Publish it (as you used to do).

Humm. Contrasting all those printing-press induced habits with the pearls of the internet - it just looks so obsolete and anachronistic: wasting piles of paper (or screen space and disk memory) for content production that is counteracting being Mutually Exclusive & Collectively Exhaustive (MECE). There is some room for creative destruction.

The internet offers a great platform for offering content that is MECE. Why are you not using it in that way? What if we had something similar to an alphabetic order, and some easy-to-learn discipline to place new content as well?

That is the promise of the Actor Atlas, the Wikiworx platform, and the development dashboards building upon them. Step by step, their navigation and content-chunk structures are approaching maturity. The broad scope and universal utility of the Actor Atlas can be appreciated when browsing its Recent Forum Posts. Each post places a particular Actor Atlas page in a discourse that was hot during the past year.

In 2013 the crowd using the Actor Atlas and the linked local development dashboards must grow.

Follow this blog, @collaboratewiki, or Wkiworx Academy, or become a value partner of Wikinetix and join the creative co-destruction of your obsolete practices.

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Wikinetix - Value Relationships announced!

The value relationships to rapidly grow the curated content of the Actor Atlas, and share the earnings from the resulting value creation, have been announced at the Wikinetix value relationships page.

Pricing information will come available soon.

Start exploring the underpinning solutions (see tags) now!

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Street lighting revolution in the make? Can FIPEL substitute LED in climate-friendly street lighting initiatives?

On June 18 2012, the Climate Group launched a call for making global street lighting LED-based or as efficient.

Recently FIPEL lighting technology has been announced, it may imply considerable ligthing cost reductions.

How soon will the stakeholders of the Climate Group’s Call to Action embrace the new technology?

Join the discussion and fact finding at the Actor Atlas page on Function of Government 06.4.0 - Street lighting (CS).

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Links to this video by ICIMOD on the livelihood of mountain men and women in Nepal have been added at these (Nepal) Actor Atlas pages: * http://nepal.actor-atlas.info/ddb:mustang (part of the video is on people living in Mustang District) * http://nepal.actor-atlas.info/csm:0113 (growing of vegetables and melons, roots and tubers)

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Global online consultation input: governance in the Post-2015 Development Framework

Below post was contributed in the consultation Phase I (19 November – 2 December): Building blocks for governance in a post-2015 development framework:

The  global development framework in the Post-2015 Agenda should facilitate monitoring & evaluation, planning, decision making that drive adoption of  innovations in all sectors of industry and all functions of government as covered respectively by International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC) and Classification of Functions of Government (COFOG) .

The implied large number of indicators becomes manageable by organising them in a framework such as the one illustrated for functions of government in the Indicator Dictionary ( http://www.indicator-dictionary.info/ ).  Social media and the internet enable shared use of most indicators (definitions, and links to data sets available or periodically acquired by national statistics bodies or local research teams).  Sectoral focus and level of an indicator are further explained at the above link.

In addition, I support the recommendations that the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights makes in their conceptual and methodological framework (http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Indicators/Pages/framework.aspx ): the development of structural, process and outcome indicators. This configuration of indicators should help assess the steps being taken by States in addressing their obligations – from commitments and acceptance of international human rights (and other) standards (structural indicators) to efforts being made to meet the obligations that flow from the standards (process indicators) and on to the results of those efforts (outcome indicators).

Many posts below address the ongoing failure of true democratic and inclusive participation in governance from the local to the international level.

I am convinced that social media and the internet offers unseized opportunities to overcome these persistent failures.  It is now technically feasible to implement and maintain a global development framework that offers low hurdle access to evolving authentic governance content with local to global relevance. A (partial) proof of concept illustration is in http://www.actor-atlas.info/ldb:kapangan (for Kapangan, Benguet, in the Philippines).  The required (society-wide) transformations are briefly  (and in general terms)  explained in http://www.slideshare.net/JanGoossenaerts/dr-shingo-and-the-actor-atlas : with attention for (i) imbedding principles in culture,  (ii) structuring tools into a systems context, and (iii) using specific methods and tools to create point-solutions.

Furthermore, the report Organizational challenges for an effective aid architecture: traditional deficits, the Paris Agenda and beyond by Faust, Jörg & Messner, Dirk (2011) url contains a very valuable analysis of themes that are also relevant to governance in the Post-2015 Agenda.

The report prompted me to propose a further refinement and challenging of Faust & Messner's stylistic objectives and diagnostic hypotheses, to be followed by an elaboration of solution directions, and an aid regime re-design. Supported by a content structuring and sharing platform such as the Actor Atlas, the Institution Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework  --pioneered by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom--  would be instrumental in performing participatively the necessary aid regime analysis, diagnosis, re-design and the launching of the aid regime transition. (AAMN Discussion Paper 001 of the Alliance of Aid Monitor Nepal (AAMN))

PS. In the COFOG, a consultation such as this would fit under class 01.3.2 - Overall planning and statistical services (CS) ( http://unstats.un.org/unsd/cr/registry/regcs.asp?Cl=4&Lg=1&Co=01.3.2 )

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Oil Contracts in Foreign Countries and Exproriation

Check the excellent article Slippery Negotiations: The Give and Take of Oil Contracts in Foreign Countries, Knowledge@Wharton, Nov. 20, 2012.

For future reference, a link to the article has been added in the Actor Atlas:

at the ISIC section-level sector map B - Mining and quarrying because the theme and recommendations are pertinent to all mining sectors.

at the ISIC class-level sector map 0610 - Extraction of crude petroleum

at the ISIC class-level sector map 8411 - General public administration activities because the theme is pertinent to CPC subclass 91112 - Financial and fiscal services.

at the COFOG division-level government function map 01 General Public Services because the theme is pertinent to COFOG class 0112 - Financial and fiscal affairs (CS).

In each map the article is listed alongside other resources that matter to decision makers in the sector of industry or function of government.

The article has also been pinned on the Pinterest board Sustainable Development - MoneySmart.